The Temporal Beacon
by SamusOlderBrother
Summary: Hermione Granger invents the impossible: time travel. Harry Potter, Trouble Magnet and generally the Hero Of The Story, is her guinea pig. Starts off at the end of Goblet of Fire and the end of Prisoner of Azkaban (it's time travel).


June 24, 1995

Cedric Diggory was dead.

Peter Pettigrew had completed the ritual to raise the Dark Lord.

Harry Potter stood bound, watching the whole thing unfold.

As the Dark Lord rose, he summoned his Death Eaters. The black-robed followers began streaming in with sudden pops of apparation. Harry felt a pinch followed by a thud into the side of his chest. Peter Pettigrew stood next to him.

"I'm terribly sorry, Harry, but this is for the best."

Pettigrew pulled something out of Harry's left side and it started to feel quite wet and warm. His breath became ragged. He coughed and pain licked over his left lung. His vision was blurry, his glasses having fallen off his face. The edges of his vision were starting to go black anyway. Was he standing or lying down? He couldn't tell any longer.

Then he couldn't feel the wetness. He didn't even feel like he was sweating, even though he'd been running himself ragged. The darkness began closing in, leaving him only a blurry speck until even that drifted into darkness. The last thing he remembered was feeling cold.

000

Harry woke with as start. He fumbled for his glasses.

"Hey, Mate, you need to hurry up 'fore Hermione gets here!"

"Whu – ?"

"She's mental! She wants to revise! Again!"

"What do you mean?"

"Exams, Harry! She wants to revise for the end of year exams. I'm putting my foot down. We've studied enough. I don't care if I did spend some time in Madam Pomfrey's last month, I'm through revising."

Harry couldn't quite place it, but Ron looked wrong somehow. "What about the Triwizard Cup?"

"The what?"

"The Triwizard Cup? You know, the stupid contest that I didn't even want to enter?"

"I've no idea what you're on about, Mate. Let's hurry up and get down to the Great Hall for breakfast before Hermione finds us and drags us off who knows where to _revise_."

Harry pulled on his robes, noting that they seemed smaller than the last time he wore them, but they fit just fine. He followed Ron down to breakfast.

"Harry!" Hermione rushed across the hall to the table.

"Aw, shite."

"It worked! I thought I was going mad when I woke up suddenly at 3:37 AM this morning instead of standing around with all of the other spectators at the last event. What happened to you? Did you die? What was it like? Did Krum do something to you? What happened? How did you trigger the runes? Where were you? What kind of wards were there? We couldn't see anything from the spectators' box. You have to tell me everything!"

Harry blinked. Ron sat, silent.

"Hermione…" Harry took a hard look at his closest friend. "What the bloody hell did you do?"

Hermione took a deep breath, looked around, and shook her head. "I've just now realized that I've completely messed up." She pulled a smooth rock out of her pocket and handed it to Harry. She pulled another out and handed it to Ron. She then pulled her wand out and intoned, "Reset."

000

Harry was in bed. Again. Someone was shaking him and Hermione was shouting for him to wake up.

"What's going on?"

Harry rolled out of bed onto the floor, reaching for his glasses. Hermione handed them over to him.

"I messed that last one up. Sorry."

"What do you mean? What last one?"

"The last timeline, of course. What did you do to mess up the original?"

"Not enough information, Hermione. I still don't know what's going on. Start from the beginning."

"As you know, I'm taking Ancient Runes this year–"

"You took it last year too."

"Stop interrupting. As I was saying, I'm taking Ancient Runes this year and I've also been given a Time Turner to accommodate the extra classes. Well, I thought, 'Why limit myself to six hours? What if I could travel through years?' So I set about figuring out the different versions of time travel. The type that Time Turners use is the Novikov self-consistency principle. I looked up a bunch of this stuff at a Muggle library over the Christmas hols.

"Anyway, I was thinking about an American film called Back To The Future where they can make all sorts of changes and they just get a new timeline. The Time Turners don't operate like that, but that doesn't mean it isn't possible. When I was researching the Novokov self-consistency principle, my father took me to the library at Oxford. They had these machines that linked to all of the Universities all over the world.

"So I went on this machine and did some research. It took me a couple of days, but then I had a breakthrough. What if instead of bodily sending something back in time, as the Time Turner does, we could send back information? That's all memories are, really, is information. So I set about creating a network node that would relay the information. It transfers the information sent through time into a sort of memory charm and stuffs it in your head.

"I was wandering the castle, thinking about the problem when I stumbled across a room on the seventh floor. It had everything I needed! I set up the node with a set of runes carved into a massive marble block. It wasn't until next year, close to the end of the tournament, that I figured out the maths behind linking the node block into a set of information.

"I snuck into your room at night after the second challenge and tattooed the relay onto your bum. Nice bum, by the way. I used you as a Guinea pig, but I didn't want to be left behind, so I linked myself into your relay as well.

"I'm really sorry about that. I should have told you, but I was scared something would happen like it has every year and I didn't want you to turn me down and I was going to tell you and then we woke up and I totally forgot about sneaking in and tattooing your bum and now you're going to hate me and I should just go back and–"

"I died."

"Well, yes, of course. That's the only way you could have triggered it."

"I got stabbed in the chest by Peter bloody Pettigrew. Right after he resurrected Voldemort. I know I should be angry with you about tattooing my arse, but I just can't be. You saved my life with that tattoo. I don't understand half of what you were on about, but I put together that much."

Hermione took a full ten seconds in silent thought before speaking again.

"Oh. Good. Then we'll just keep on going with this one until you die. Or we're happy with the outcome. Whichever comes first. Frankly, I'm pretty sure you're going to die a few more times. I was learning statistics and probability in the last loop. Bayes' Theorem is fascinating. Anyway, chin up! We're going to be learning _so much_!"

A/N: I read _Harry Potter and the Temporal Beacon_ by willyolioleo and lamented that it never finished. I wondered if I could work something like that out and put some ideas to electrons. This is the result. I thought to myself, "Hermione should really be more like Harry Potter-Evans-Verres (of HPMOR, obviously). Wouldn't that be fun? How would that Hermione set up a temporal beacon?" Anyway, I like getting paid for my work, so this will only see updates when I'm not on a job (like all of my fics, I suppose). If I were independently wealthy, I'd write whatever I felt like and update everything regularly. Alas, this is not the case.


End file.
